Post navigation

Marcus Aurelius tunes my RSS Feeds

The Emperor’s Handbook is a new translation of Marcus Aurelius’ classic The Meditations. Marcus Aurelius was a second century Roman emperor and stoic philosopher. You probably know him as the old guy (Richard Harris) that chose Maximus (Russell Crowe) as his successor in Gladiator. Marcus is counted among the “five good Roman emperors” [1] and his Meditations has been hailed as the single best book ever written by a major ruler. Nowadays every semi-literate hack that’s held office dumps memoirs. The more vacuous excrete before holding office! While political autobiography is usually the vilest form of pornography and begs the question; is book burning all bad? There are exceptions and The Meditations is a magnificent example.

The Emperors Handbook is a sequence of short notes. Some are sentences like:

Not knowing what other people are thinking is not the cause of much human misery, but failing to understand the workings of one’s own mind is bound to lead to unhappiness

How shameful and absurd it is for the spirit to surrender when the body is able to fight on!

What is useless for the hive is of no use to bee.

Others take a page or two. It’s not clear that Marcus intended to “publish” his notes and this may partly account for their frank and honest elegance. I don’t read ancient Greek, the language Marcus used to compose his notes, so I cannot judge his original style but the Hicks brother’s English translation is an absolute delight. I often found myself rereading passages aloud to fully savior Marcus’s phrases; they ring like poetry and tell like prose. This guy would crush modern Internet trolls!

The most striking thing about Marcus’s passages is their stark modernity. If you ignore the allusions to multiple gods and references to 2nd century contemporaries many of Marcus’s 1,800 year old notes might have been composed yesterday. The following would not be out-of-place in the preamble of any modern mathematical logic text.

Reason and logic are governed by their own laws and employ their own methods. They launch themselves at will, and they head straight for their target. This is why we call actions that seem to us reasonable and logical “right,” because they are right on target.

Of course the real measure of any work is: does it change the way you think and act? A lot of Marcus’s stoic advice will be hard for us. He repeatedly stresses the importance of playing your part in the greater scheme of things. In his view the universe is either meaningless atoms smashing together or it’s arranged by providence. If the first case holds then we should play our part because we are social beings and need the cooperation and support of others to fully prosper. If the second holds then we should strive to find our designated purpose and execute it to the best of our abilities. Either way we should do our duty without whining. A stoic man’s “got to do what a man’s got to do.”

I’m more of a skeptic than Marcus, and I have the benefit of 1,800 more years of history and science to drawn on, so until there is overwhelming, ultra-hard, fully repeatable, and independently verified scientific evidence to the contrary, it’s almost certain that life is meaningless and random! The “atoms” that smash together in the 21st century have a richer taxonomy than their hypothetical 2nd century antecedents but they are just as meaningless. The notion that we have a duty or purpose is ludicrous. We are, as Richard Dawkins wrote in the Selfish Gene long ago, robots evolved to propagate genes. And, as many have noted, it’s not clear that “intelligent robots” are ideal for gene propagation: bacteria and ants are doing a better job. I cannot accept the unsubstantiated notion of duty so I will not play my alleged part. The greater scheme will have to manage without me.

Though I reject “duty” I still find much of use in The Meditations. Of great value is Marcus’s long view.

Camillus, Caeso, Volesus, Dentatus and to a lesser degree Scipio and Cato, and yes, even Augustus, Hadrian and Antoninus are less spoken of now than they were in their own days. For all things fade away, become the stuff of legend, and are soon buried by oblivion. Mind you, this is true only for those who blazed once like bright stars in the firmament, but for the rest, as soon a few clods of earth cover their corpses, they are “out of sight, out of mind.”

That pretty much sums up my approach to the Obama administration. Marcus also has sound advice on Internet filtering.

Bear in mind that the measure of a man is the worth of the things he cares about.

If you find something predictable and shrill do a quick calculation. Does the signal justify enduring the noise? I went through my long list of Feedly RSS feeds and deleted two prominent sources of noise: The Raw Story and Breitbart. These sites are loud practitioners of look at this idiot journalism. One side is predictably far left-wing and the other is predictably far right-wing. Occasionally they cough up something worth a look but usually their articles, and attending moronic troll infested commentary, is a complete waste of time. Is such drivel worthy of my gaze? Applying Marcus’s rule I had to cut them loose. Thank you Marcus for pruning my RSS feeds.